Out in a bed of mussels, off the Monterey coast in California in a space exposed at low tide, a handful of green LEDs blink, indicating the location of a cohort of robomussels.
The little black data loggers, formed from polyester resin, have been precisely engineered by Brian Helmuth and his lab at Northeastern University to mimic the mussels already living there, a few of which researchers plucked out to make space for the fake ones. They’re here for a study of climate change, and, more precisely, its effect on one of the most important species found in the ocean.
Helmuth, a climate scientist, has been the driving force behind more than 70 of these plots, scattered across the globe, over the last 18 years. They’ve been logging information, in 10-minute intervals, on the temperature not of the air or water, but of the actual bodies of the Mytilus californianus mussels that live there. This gives a much more accurate picture of how climate change is affecting the species than the temperature of its surroundings could.
The mussels, which biologists call an “engineering species,” drive biodiversity and create habitat for other animals, says Helmuth, and so the scope of his research extends beyond the state of the intertidal ecosystems where the mussels live and to the way we understand the impacts of climate change on species, and how, and where, mussel farmers put their farms.
